Opinion

We were concerned to hear that an F1 tornado touched down in Shelby County on Friday, but we were terrified to learn later that residents in some pockets of the county didn’t hear storm sirens and weren’t warned of a dangerous weather system that was approaching.

Shelby County Emergency Management Agency Director Paul Whitman said the sirens were sounded when a surprising siege of funnel clouds were spotted by radar moving east from Jefferson County around 2:30 p.m.

One of those clouds had descended near Jeffersontown and done significant damage.

Spring fever is supposed to arrive early in March, when you see the first robin, the bright yellow of an occasional daffodil, things green, abud and, well, warming.

Spring fever is not supposed to be a full-blown summer sweat at the strike of the vernal equinox.

It’s not as if there isn’t always plenty to talk about with basketball, politics, religion, economics, basketball, politics and, I don’t know, movies, but today we have to talk about the weather, because everyone is.

“Grading procedures do not reflect today’s teaching standards,” said Thomas R. Guskey from the University of Kentucky at a recent training session for principals in Shelby County. He could prove his point with a 1917 report card that belonged to his grandmother, which looked pretty much like a report card issued today.

He and Lee Ann Jung, also from UK, shared their expertise in standards-based grading for Shelby County Public Schools because we have completed a study of their book, Grading Exceptional and Struggling Learners.

Robert Burry had a vision, and Bob Andriot saw it clearly, a vision that holds beautiful hope for downtown Shelbyville.

Mr. Andriot, a lifelong downtown businessman and property owner, and Mr. Burry, an architect, builder and restoration dreamer, have joined forces with a concept to transform one of the downtown’s most undesirable but historic eyesores, the Blue Gables, from a seedy rental property into something of vibrancy and potential.

A few weeks ago, I explained to my 10-year-old son how brackets work. I showed him the elimination process, how the winners moved one way and the losers another. I think he was more intrigued by the maze of lines than what they actually represented.

And so today I give you the NCAA Tournament, basketball’s version of a maze in which good teams get lost when their names fall on bad lines.

The city of Shelbyville’s determination to begin an aggressive crackdown on property owners who don’t follow the city’s ordinances is both strong in might and clear in hindsight.

City leaders said last week that they plan again to pursue homeowners who aren’t making required repairs in sidewalks that abut their property and that they would foreclose on property owners who are arrears in their taxes.

The emergency management leadership in Shelby County is worried about us, and so are we.

Those horrible storms that surged across Indiana and Kentucky last week – narrowly skirting Shelby County – scared the bluegrass out of us. They were not just overblown thunderstorms but powerful, twisting trains that crawled across the landscape.

As a student at Northside, at Southside and at Shelbyville High School, I never thought about the funding behind the quality teachers I had, the nice desks and school environment, the playground equipment, the athletic facilities, and especially the textbooks.

I fondly remember my textbooks – seeing what upperclassman had carried the book before it came to my hands and covering it with wallpaper sheets or plastic wrap from JJ Newberry 5 & 10.

Usually when I tell someone that I am a Democrat, I get a puzzled look and then they blurt out “WHY?!?,” as if they can’t believe anyone could be a Democrat.

What I always say is that first of all I am more of a Moderate or Independent but they don’t win elections, and I feel that the Democrats actually look out for the greater good more than the Republican Party does or claims to do.

We in Shelby County awoke Monday morning warmed by the pure, serene blanket of Currier & Ives-caliber snow.
We roused to the joy that we could have a day away from school to frolic in the not-so-cold stuff, to embrace the beauty of winter without its treachery, to enjoy a postcard from a departing season.
It was just sort of elegantly pastoral and winterfully wonderful, wasn’t it?
Did you go walking in our winter wonderland?

A troubling scenario has unfolded during the past couple of weeks about a conflict between residents and their landlords that has opened a seeping wound on the generally lovely complexion of downtown Shelbyville.

Several residents who rent apartments of some fashion from Greg Wood Properties were left for a period of time without utilities even though they say they had paid for those services in their rent payments to Mr. Wood’s company.

We’re happy to see another international company putting up its banner and moving employees into Shelby County.

Brown Jordan Inc., the world’s No. 1 maker of high-end casual and outdoor furniture, will open its showroom and warehouse in Kingbrook Industrial Park in Simpsonville next week, relocating from storm-ravaged Haleyville, Ala., to be nearer Brown Jordan’s headquarters in Louisville.

Articles that have recently been published in your newspaper about the Pleasureville City Commission have been very one-sided (“Issue about clerk’s pay linked to chicken letter,” Feb. 17). Those same articles have appeared to be making a joke out of the serious problems that have occurred and continue to occur within Pleasureville city government.

In 2006, the Kentucky Legislature took a major step towards building Kentucky’s economy by overwhelmingly passing the Emerging Technology and Consumer Choice Act. Lawmakers recognized that outdated, monopoly-era regulations were hampering competition and stifling investment in advanced technologies, and took direct action to reduce them.

This was a scene worthy of every clichéyou’ve ever read. Every trite phrase to define tension, intensity and personal fortitude was pulsing through the atmosphere. Every syllable of coach-speak echoed silently from the corners.

Two teams confronted one another over the scant space of a yard or two, coaches tensely watching nearby, fans crammed into the standing-room-only swelter of a small venue.

Paul Hornback is in his second full year of representing Shelby County in the state Senate, and he is starting to step into the sometimes squishy purchase of both political position and important decision.
He also will begin to see that those processes will begin to erode his legislative honeymoon with his constituents, depending upon their perspectives.

Were you as amazed as we were to read the story of Thomas Samuel “T.S.” Baxter, the first African-American elected to Shelbyville City Council, where he served for almost two decades before being gerrymandered out of his seat because of his race?

We discovered Mr. Baxter as a small photograph in Portrait of the Past, Shelby County Kentucky 1865-1980. In fact, the caption beneath his photograph was the only clue we had to the story of T.S. Baxter.

Steve Doyle seems to be very poorly educated on the art of tattooing ("On Valentine's Day, no love loss for tattooing," Feb. 15). I am going to try my best to inform him without offending him, a quality he would be well advised to inherit (oops, there I go already).